This morning on the subway, I overheard someone arguing again about "social mining" and "attention is mining." I felt a bit amused but also a little anxious: yes, attention is valuable, but when it comes to cross-chain, frankly, you can't just shout slogans and move assets.

Take IBC/message passing as an example. Each cross-chain transfer actually involves trusting several layers: whether the source chain has truly finalized (no rollbacks), whether the relayer/relay has honestly transferred the packet (usually permissionless but can be stuck due to fees and online uptime), whether the target chain's light client/verification logic is correctly implemented (a bug in the contract/module can't be fixed by "attention"), and further down, the validator set/consensus security. If the bridge adds multi-signature or oracles, that's trusting an additional group of people.

When I look at cross-chain projects now, I don't ask about "narrative" first. I ask: am I trusting the chain, the people, or just a piece of code... Anyway, I’ll first do a small test transfer before moving large amounts, just to feel more secure.